Angel picked up the phone and tapped in a number.

‘DS Taylor, SOCO,’ a voice answered.

‘Angel here. I hope you’ve finished going over Quigley’s drum.’

‘Just making out the report, sir. We found nothing incriminating there. You only asked us to search it?’

‘And repair the door.’

‘That’s done.’

‘Because I’m releasing him.’

Taylor’s voice went up an octave. ‘I thought you had evidence, sir?’

‘Got an alibi,’ Angel said with a sniff. ‘Now what about your findings on the Santana place?’

‘It’s all done, sir. Just needs typing up.’

‘Bring your notes down. There are some things I need to know urgently.’

‘Right, sir. I’ll come down straightaway.’

‘Make it ten minutes,’ he said and replaced the phone. He went out of the office down to the cells. He asked the duty jailer to let him into Quigley’s cell.

When Quigley saw Angel he got to his feet. ‘Now what?’ he said. ‘What new caper are you going to be putting me through?’

‘I’ve spoken to Miss Freedman and … she confirms your statement. You are free to go.’

‘I should frigging well think so.’

Angel led him out of the cell and up to the duty sergeant, where he sulkily collected his possessions and some paperwork was dealt with.

As they walked to the front door of the station, Angel said: ‘Do you need transport home?’

Quigley’s eyes flashed. ‘What? In one of your bloody police cars?’

‘Well, you’re surely not expecting us to hire a stretch limo for you, are you?’

Quigley glared at him and said: ‘I can get a taxi, and pay for it myself.’ Then he pushed his way through the glass door and outside to freedom.

Angel watched him go.

Quigley walked quickly to the end of the street then round the corner towards town.

Angel sighed then returned to his office. He found Ahmed waiting at the door. ‘What is it, lad? Come in.’

‘I’ve got that stuff on Laurence Smith, sir,’ he said, opening a cream file.

‘Ah, yes,’ Angel said. ‘Let’s see. Does it say how tall he is?’

Ahmed blinked then delved into the file. ‘Six feet, two inches, sir.’

Angel pursed his lips. ‘That was the same height as Liam Quigley,’ he said, mostly for his own benefit.

Ahmed nodded.

But Angel couldn’t remember any other feature that was similar. His hair was a much lighter brown colour for one thing, he recalled. But even so, that wasn’t relevant to the ID in this instance: the killer’s hair was covered with a woolly hat. He looked up at Ahmed. ‘What’s Smith’s address now?’ he said.

‘Last known address 36 Sebastopol Terrace, sir.’

‘Leave the file with me and ask DI Asquith if he could possibly spare two men to go down there and bring Smith in for questioning.’

‘Right, sir,’ Ahmed said and dashed off, as DS Taylor came in.

‘Ah, Don,’ Angel said. ‘Sit down.’

‘I’ve brought that report on Quigley’s house, sir, just for the record,’ Taylor said.

‘Leave it there, Don,’ he said, pointing to the other file on his desk. ‘I’ll read it later. Right now, tell me about Peter Santana’s Mercedes.’

‘There was nothing surprising there, sir. Santana’s fingerprints were on the door handle, gear stick, handbrake and steering wheel. They were also on the catch on the boot. I did a swab on the floor area of the boot, and can confirm that the dead pig had been there.’

Angel nodded. It was only what he expected. ‘There were some threads or something on the catch where the boot lock is.’

‘Yes, sir. They were threads from the cheesecloth that the pig was wrapped in.’

‘Ah yes. And the mark on the polished floor of the hall?’

‘That was where the pig was dragged into the downstairs bedroom. There were a few tiny pieces of gravel from the drive outside consistent with the pig having been rested in the drive momentarily before it was dragged into the house.’

‘And there were no indications to suggest that anyone other than Peter Santana had been in or anywhere near his car the night he was murdered?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So, we now know that the pig was put in that particular car at the abattoir as the man had said, that Santana drove it up to the lodge and, heavy though it is, he apparently single-handedly dragged it out of the car boot, along the hall, into the bedroom.’

Taylor nodded. ‘It’s a fair assumption, sir.’

‘Now then.’ He stopped and sighed. ‘Did he put the nightdress on the pig by himself, or did the man who murdered him assist him first?’

Taylor watched a fly flitting round the office window and hoped for inspiration. Angel rubbed his chin.

‘Perhaps we’ll never know,’ Taylor said.

Angel said: ‘Were there any other prints on the fancy cellophane wrapping that the nightdress was wrapped in?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then it’s a fair assumption that Santana dressed the pig in the nightdress by himself.’

‘Surely the more important question is why?’ said Taylor.

Angel nodded. ‘When we know that, we shall know who murdered him.’

‘Well, it’s got me beat, sir,’ said Taylor.

‘At the moment, it’s got me beat, too.’

Taylor smiled. ‘You’ll solve it, sir. This is just your cup of tea, isn’t it?’

There was a compliment in there somewhere. Angel didn’t feel like acknowledging it. He had doubts. He had the reputation of always solving his cases; this might be the one that would spoil that record.

‘We’ll see,’ he muttered.

‘All that we have to deal with now, sir, is Vincent Doonan’s house,’ Taylor said. ‘We should be able to start that tomorrow.’

Angel nodded. ‘As soon as you possibly can.’

‘Of course,’ Taylor said and stood up to go.

‘Just a minute, Don,’ Angel said and he leaned down to the floor and picked up the cardboard box he had brought back from the antique shop and put it on the desk. It was still sealed.

Taylor looked at it and frowned.

Angel said: ‘You will have seen the latest report from the Drugs and Abusive Substances Squad. The one about heroin being found inside children’s toys, hollow wooden toy forts and other wooden objects, ornaments and household paraphernalia.’

‘Yes. I’ve seen it, sir.’

‘In here is a cuckoo clock,’ Angel said.

Taylor shook his head. ‘A cuckoo clock, sir?’

‘The town is flooded with them. Everywhere you go, there’s one of these on the wall. There’s a shop downtown with hundreds in stock. They’re pushing them out at a tenner a time.’

Taylor’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Ten pounds? Cheap enough. Do they work, sir? Do they keep good time?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Where do they come from? Taiwan? China?’

‘Switzerland. I want you to take this one and have a good look at it. See if there are any hollow places where drugs, particularly heroin, are stashed or have been stashed. There must be some reason why there are so many over here, and why they are being peddled so cheaply. And I want you to find out what it is.’

‘Right, sir,’ Taylor said. ‘If there’s anything concealed in it, I’ll find it.’ Then he picked up the box and left.

Angel watched him close the door. He rubbed his chin. He was still wondering and worrying about Peter Santana and the business with the pig. He stood up and walked around the tiny office for a few minutes. His eyes caught sight of the two new files on his desk. He reached out for the one about Laurence Smith, created by Ahmed, extracted from the NPC. He opened it up, sat down and began to read it.

Essentially, it said that Smith had been found guilty with two others in 2001 of stealing 120 yards of copper wire from a stretch of the signalling system than ran alongside the railway line between Bromersley and Wakefield. Smith was awarded six months, which he had served in HMP Lincoln. Interestingly, his two accomplices were Vincent Doonan and Harry Savage. Subsequently, Smith was found guilty on his own in 2002 of robbing a petrol station in Sheffield of £1,200, for which he had served four years in Strangeways.

Angel blew out a length of air noisily. Doonan and Smith had done a job together. That was something of a surprise and maybe a coincidence. Thieves often fall out among themselves. But it confirmed the possibility that Clem Bailey could have made an accurate identification.

Angel knew that Harry Savage was on the run following his dramatic escape from the Magistrates’ Court at Shiptonthorpe in March last. He recalled the crime of the stealing of the copper wire, the subsequent offence of conning an old lady out of her £8,000 savings with a fake insurance scam, and there was another unusual job. He stole a load of special paper from a delivery lorry parked outside a transport café on the A1 near Scotch Corner in April. They knew that that job was down to him because he left amazingly clear moving pictures of himself on a CCTV camera on the car park.

Savage’s disappearance had been a thoroughly smooth job; no positive sightings of him had been made and there was a UK all-stations call-out for him. If he did turn up, he might be able to throw some light on the relationship between Doonan and Smith. As Angel was looking through the window, he also supposed he could see a herd of pigs flying past.

There was a knock at the door. It was Scrivens. He was clutching an armload of A4-size paper files to his chest.

‘Is it convenient to see me, sir?’

‘Come in, lad. I was wondering where you had got to.’

The files slid about precariously in Scrivens’ arms as he closed the door.

‘Put the stuff down there,’ Angel said, pointing to the corner of his desk.

Scrivens was relieved to unload the files. ‘Thank you, sir.’ He placed them down carefully and squared them off.

Angel leaned towards him with eyes narrowed and said: ‘Now, what have you got?’

Scrivens said, ‘The computer geeks recovered all the work, including the deletions, Peter Santana had tapped into his three computers over the past month, sir, that is, since 15 November, and I have printed it all out. I have also printed out all of his files that were open on that date and since. And I must say, sir, that the bulk of it consists of scene after scene of scripts, with instructions for the characters and the cameraman. Also plots in abbreviated form. I suppose they were ideas and thoughts he had had as he was pressing along with writing other things. And then there were loads of short notes, obviously to remind him about something or to tell somebody to do something. And there are lists. And drafts of business letters. Boring stuff like insurance. And there’s also—’

‘Insurance? What’s this with insurance, Ted?’

‘He wanted to make changes. Increase the cover on the farmhouse up at Tunistone. I think it was insured for one and a half million, but he wanted to double it … increase it to three.’

Lot of money for a farmhouse, Angel thought, out in the wilds. Mind you, it had a swimming pool, lots of land, a magnificent view. But he wouldn’t like to live there. Most of the year it would be too cold. He shuddered as he thought about it.

‘It’s in there, sir,’ Scrivens said. ‘As near as I can remember. Apparently there had been some earth movement, and the letter to his insurance broker said something about the risk of fire had therefore greatly increased. If electric cables were severed by earth movement, it could lead to explosion or fire … that sort of thing.’

Angel screwed his face up and rubbed his chin. ‘I’ve not heard of any earth movement up there.’

‘Nor have I, sir.’

Angel wrinkled his nose and sniffed. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yes, sir. I found the partial drafting of a will.’

Angel looked up. ‘Really? What’s that?’

‘His will, sir. It looks like he intended changing it.’

‘Right, lad. What were the changes? Who was to inherit what?’

Scrivens shuffled through a file, sorted out a sheet of A4 and handed it to him.

‘It’s not that straightforward,’ Scrivens said. ‘All his estate, at the time, was left to his wife, Felicity. He wanted to split it fifty-fifty and create “The Peter Santana Trust”. He wrote: “I want the Trust to be run by a small committee, say three, with Bill Isaacs in the chair. It is to be for the benefit of writers/producers of original ideas who have the talent, but not the funds, to develop them and take them through to completed satisfying entertainment on tape or film.”’

Angel took the sheet of paper and read the paragraph for himself.

‘Is it significant, sir?’

‘When did he write this?’

Scrivens looked at the cover of the file. ‘Monday 8 December, sir.’

‘Hmmm. It’s significant that he was thinking about his last will and testament only a week before he was murdered. And that he must think well of Mr Isaacs.’

‘He’s the boss of the studio.’

‘Was there anything about a pig?’ asked Angel.

‘Not much, really, sir.’

His face brightened. Anything was better than nothing. ‘What is there?’

Out of the same file, Scrivens pulled out another sheet of A4 and handed it to him. ‘It’s just a simple list, sir. It was tapped out on the same day.’

It read:

Angel read it twice, then copied it out. When he had finished, he rubbed his chin and frowned.

‘What’s it mean, sir?’ Scrivens said.

‘Don’t know, lad,’ he said. ‘Ether is a bit old-fashioned. Doctors and dentists used to use it as an anaesthetic. I am not aware of anything else you might use it for. The pig was dead so I can’t see that he would want to anaesthetize it. A “dead pig, fresh, 100 lbs”, is self-explanatory, as is a “silk nightdress”.’

‘Why do you think he decided on silk, sir?’

‘Why indeed, lad? Why not cotton? It’s cheaper. Does the same job on a dead pig. Covers it up. Silk might be more glamorous, but whatever you dressed a dead pig in wouldn’t make it any the more interesting, would it?’

‘And “Monday night next”, what’s the significance of that, sir?’

‘I don’t know what Santana intended it to mean. But ominously, that’s the date when he was murdered,’ he said.

‘The pig, the nightdress and Monday night next were all to do with the crime scene at Tunistone, sir. But we didn’t find any ether there’ said Scrivens.

Angel stood up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said and ran his hand through his hair. He walked up and down the little office with his hands behind his back. After a few moments he pointed to the pile of files and said, ‘Are you certain there’s nothing else in there about a pig?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Have you read it all?’

Scrivens hesitated. ‘I’ve looked at everything, sir. I haven’t always tried to understand it all.’

‘Are you sure there’s no plot or story involving a pig or a monkey or a tarantula, or anything else being dressed in a nightdress and put in a bed?’

‘There’s nothing like that in there, sir.’

‘Right, lad,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll take it home. It’ll be a little light reading for me over the weekend,’ he added, blowing out a foot of air.

‘I want you to understand that I have come here of my own free will,’ Laurence Smith said in a powerful voice with an accent straight from the valleys.

But it wasn’t true. The two uniformed men from DI Asquith’s team had said that he was very argumentative and vocal, and that they had to use a lot of persuasion to get him out of his house into their car, and then when they arrived at the station more argument to get him out of their car and into the interview room.

‘I hear what you say,’ Angel said evenly.

‘And furthermore,’ Smith continued, ‘I have no idea who this man sat next to me is. You tell me he is a solicitor acting for me, but he could be one of your coppers for all I know.’

Angel looked across the table at Mr Bloomfield and invited him to show Smith his credentials and hoped that in so doing some rapport may develop between the two of them, thus allowing them to move on to the interview.

Angel rose and left the table and Scrivens followed.

Bloomfield was a very experienced criminal solicitor. If he couldn’t get Smith’s confidence, nobody could.

The delay lasted only three minutes. Angel and Scrivens returned and were seated at the table opposite Smith and Bloomfield.

Angel switched on the recording machine and made the usual statement about persons present, the date and the time. After that, the first one to speak was Smith.

‘I want it understood that I have no idea what I have been brought in here about, and that I have done nothing wrong.’

Bloomfield whispered something in his ear but Smith didn’t reply or react.

Angel said: ‘This is purely a preliminary inquiry, Mr Smith. The position simply is this: a man was murdered in the Fisherman’s Rest pub on Canal Road last Tuesday, the sixteenth. You were picked out by a witness from over a hundred photographs that showed only part of the face. Mostly the eyes.’

‘I wasn’t there,’ Smith said. ‘It wasn’t me.’

‘The witness was only eighteen inches from the man’s face,’ Angel said.

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘It’s hardly likely he was mistaken.’

‘It wasn’t me. He may need glasses. I expect he was drunk.’

‘He was stone cold sober. Where were you at nine o’clock?’

‘I was at home.’

‘Who with?’

‘I was by myself. I live alone. Who would I be with? Huh.’

‘Is there anybody who can support your story?’

‘It’s not a story. It’s a fact, man. I was at home, alone. I live alone these days.’

Angel rubbed his chin. ‘What were you doing?’

‘I don’t know now. Probably watching the box. There’s nothing on, but I still look at the bloody thing. It’s like a drug. Cheaper than Horlicks. Sends me to sleep.’

‘You knew about the shooting?’

‘I did. I read it in the paper. It’s all fantasy. I also read all about you investigating the murder of that millionaire chap and the pig in the pink nightie. Huh. True life is better than TV any time, boyo.’

The muscles of Angel’s jaw tightened. ‘It’s no fantasy,’ he growled. ‘And it’s not a matter to joke about.’

‘I was not joking. I am not laughing, am I?’

Angel stared at him. It was true. His face was as glum as ever. Smith never smiled.

‘You knew the dead man,’ Angel said. ‘A friend of yours. His name was Vincent Doonan.’

‘Yes. I knew him. A nasty, dishonest individual. No friend of mine.’

Angel’s eyes flashed. ‘He went down for the identical offence you did.’

‘We may have relieved a public body of a small amount of its worn-out scrap wire—’

‘You stole 120 yards of copper wire and brought chaos and misery for around thirty hours to thousands of passengers travelling on the main line from Kings Cross to Edinburgh.’

‘But Vincent Doonan stole from me and from Harry Savage. We were partners. It was a monstrous, wicked thing to do to your mates.’

Angel’s fists tightened. He must stay cool. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Doonan wasn’t any good at arithmetic, you see. Apparently he had never learned how to divide by three. He knew how to divide by four, though, because he gave Harry Savage and me a fourth each, and himself two fourths, which I didn’t think was quite right.’

Angel blinked when he heard him mention Harry Savage. He knew he needed to be found and arrested.

‘Where is Harry these days?’ Angel said lightly. ‘Haven’t seen him around.’

‘Don’t know about that, Inspector Angel. I give him a wide berth. Don’t think I seen him twice since I come out of prison. Probably gone abroad for a rest.’

‘Hmmm.’ Angel rubbed his chin. ‘Are you sure you didn’t go to the Fisherman’s Rest on Tuesday night?’

‘Positive. I have no money for drinking, man.’

‘What do you do with your money, then?’

‘I don’t have any. You know that. If I had any money it would go straight to Marie and the kids. A court order, Inspector Angel. You know all about court orders, don’t you? If I earn any money, it goes straight to my wife and kids. I get nothing of it. I could never earn enough to pay off what I owe, so I am permanently in debt. I would have to be the Minister for Welsh Affairs or get moulded to look like Jordan to be able to afford to work again. My giro gives me just enough to keep me alive. The government knows this. They make the calculation. It’s precariously close to the breadline, though.’

‘You’ve money to spare to buy yourself a paper.’

‘I read them free in the public library.’

‘And you can afford a good suit.’

‘It’s a cut-down of my late father’s funeral suit. Tailored perfectly by my dear mother.’

Angel rubbed his chin. ‘Well, I am not satisfied with your explanation. I am going to hold you here until I have obtained a warrant and searched your house.’

Smith jumped to his feet. ‘This is bloody outrageous!’ he yelled.

Bloomfield reached up and tugged at his sleeve. ‘Sit down. Please sit down.’

Smith ignored him. He stared at Angel and said: ‘But I didn’t do it. I wasn’t there. Why don’t you believe me?’

Angel stiffened. ‘Because you said exactly the same thing when you were pulled in for stealing the copper wire. You said you didn’t do it. Even when it was traced back to you and Doonan and Savage, even when we found your fingerprints on two places on the cable, even in court after you had taken the oath, you told lie after lie and kept on lying. It was only when the jury had found you guilty and I spoke to you in the court cells that you slyly, grudgingly admitted it. And that was because you thought I could influence the custodial board to send you to HMP Doncaster to be near your home instead of somewhere far away. Some hopes. That’s why.’

Smith shrugged and shook his head. He knew it was true. Then he suddenly said, ‘That doesn’t make me a frigging murderer!’

Angel’s lips tightened back against his teeth. He looked across at him and said, ‘If you didn’t do it, you’ve nothing to worry about, have you?’ Then he leaned over to the recording control panel. ‘Interview ended 1621 hours,’ he said, then he switched off the tape, turned to Scrivens and said, ‘Search him, get the keys to his house and take him down to a cell.’